Join me at Readercon (August 13-15, 2021), gone virtual and running for the low weekend price of $25 this year. It’s a conference on imaginative literature that focuses almost exclusively on the written work, and I’ve loved it for years.
I’m also on a couple of panels this year, and moderating one of them, so you’ve got plenty of opportunities to either see me via Zoom or watch the panels after the fact. The topic I get to talk about are amazing, and I’m delighted by the panelists I get to spend time with.
My schedule is below:
Reading Fantasy Through a Motif Index Lens Format: Panel
14 Aug 2021, Saturday 11:00 AM EST – Main Track 1
Folklorists use motif indexes to catalog and analyze folk tales from around the world. The existence of TV Tropes suggests the need for new motif indexes that fit new forms of literature, but we can also apply folklore motif indexes to 21st-century fantastical fiction. Which motifs have had staying power for hundreds of years, and what other expected or unexpected patterns do we find? What does treating fiction as folklore bring to the reading experience?
Katherine Crighton, Stephanie Feldman (mod), Jeffrey Ford, Karen Heuler, L. Penelope
Content Tags: Implementation, Accommodation, and Ancillary Art Format: Panel
15 Aug 2021, Saturday 4:00 PM EST – Main Track 2
The increased prevalence of content tags has lead to growing questions around implementation. Useful for accommodation, content tags are also deployed on dynamic platforms such as AO3 to warn, advertise, and joke, becoming extra-diagetic material that is enjoyable on its own terms while providing meaningful context for the work. Still, there is a divide between those who want them and those who find them objectionable. How do content tags enhance and complicate reader experience, and what are emerging best practices that bookstores or publishers could adopt?
Katherine Crighton (mod), Gillian Daniels, Foz Meadows, AJ Odasso, Megan Whalen Turner
Katherine Crighton 